JAPANEXILE

As usual I am not going to stick to any sort of chronological order. Its far quicker to group things together. So, Mike & Ben’s apartment, Junten, and Oji in general. The place is smaller than ours, but not by a particularly big margin, and there is obviously a good reason that it is small – its in the centre of Tokyo (sort of – its hard to decide what the centre of somewhere as massive as Tokyo is – its in a good spot whatever) The only real difference is that their kitchen and living room are two separate small rooms, whereas we have our larger combined kitchen/lounge. They don’t seem to use the living room at all, Mike’s bedroom is the place to be when entertaining of watching TV. The apartment is like many places in big cities however, rather noisy. The balcony overlooks a charmingly busy crossroad and the highway is pretty much the same height as their windows – so noisy. Especially if you compare to Toya, where your ears ring its so quiet at night (Yet I still wear earplugs…).

We spent only a brief morning in Junten and didn’t really get to see anywhere near as much as I wanted. We came in and talked for a while at one of the advanced ‘leaver’ classes. Named as such as it has people in it who have spent long periods in English speaking countries and have as such gained near fluency. This class was a lot of fun actually, they came up with some good interesting questions (What do you look for in a girl etc) so Craig and I could come up with some good answers as well. As Barney (The American who Mike & Ben teach with) so correctly put, Craig and I are not just teachers – we’re entertainers. In the next class we were there to help judge as English speaking contest, they all had to read out various famous English speeches from memory (if they could) whilst we judged on their pronunciation, memory and something else. It was mind numbingly boring and as I hadn’t had much sleep the night before I mainly stared drifting in and out of consciousness and gave pretty non precise marks. A terrible judge really. That was it really for our time at Junten. We saw where Mike & Ben work in the ELC (English Language Centre), met the headmaster, who gave us a nice hanging cloth calendar. We went to the local Indian for lunch with Mike, Ben, and the two English teachers – Barney is definitely an interesting guy, and quite different to how I expected him to be.

My thoughts on Junten - a nice school, with a very impressive main building. The schools we work in up here in Hokkaido are just worlds apart, same for our jobs really. Mike & Ben are very much ‘real’ teachers, having to clock in an out, working all day in the same place and are treated like teachers as far as I can tell. Their work just in general seems so much more serious than ours. Especially this year, we have had far less work (I’m not complaining), and everything is just so much more relaxed up here. Having so many jobs keeps things fresh and interesting. I wouldn’t change jobs, not for a second. I imagine they’d say the same though.

Oji. Most people think of Tokyo as being the same as any other large modern city – but its not really. Its made up of many, many, towns and cities that have grown into each other and as such each town still has its centre and own character to an extent. I can see why the Tokyo guys like Oji, its got everything you need really, nice restaurants, supermarket, arcade, karaoke – all within walking distance. And conveniently its only 30mins away by train from Shibuya and the ‘real’ centre of Tokyo. Despite being completely and totally different in nearly every way I can’t help myself but draw comparisons between Oji and Toya. I’ll admit slight jealousy at all the entertainment options available to them, and more significantly the chance to meet far more people – perhaps even people our own age! But there is always a downside – money just goes, so I doubt I’d be able to enjoy the options available to me like I would want to. The same for clubs and bars – which I am a big fan of, Japan however, has a drinking age of 20, unlike Sapporo however, they seem to ID in Tokyo. Hopefully I’ll find time to make more comparisons between our two projects, but for now, I’m happy to home in Toya.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.